This post is a departure from my blog's industry focus that I wouldn't have contemplated if not for the highly unusual circumstances we're facing in the COVID-19 pandemic. The scientific aspects of pharmaceutical patents are above my head, but that also applies to the heads of those politicians proposing compulsory licensing of such patents in the current situation.
I just became aware of a disconcerting statement by the chairman of the center-right European People's Party (EPP) group in the European Parliament, Manfred Weber MEP (Christian Social Union, CSU), quoted in a German newspaper article (my translation):
"If need be, admitted vaccines must also be made by others on the basis of compulsory licensing."
This is the same Manfred Weber who lent unconditional support to the EPP's Axel Voss MEP with respect to upload filters (EU Copyright Reform). In other words, he wants IP overenforcement against kids who upload videos from a private party to YouTube, with some commercial music playing in the background, but he wants to deprive the companies who made a miracle happen--the availability of multiple COVID-19 vaccines after such a short time--of their rights.
His party, the CSU, is the regional sister party (comparable to the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party vs. the Democratic Party) of Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). It's unlikely that he would toss out such an idea if it hadn't at least been floating around in those circles.
The EU is obviously in deep-shit trouble. In yesterday's New York Times there was an article entitled Slow Pace of Vaccinations Pushes Europe Toward Second Economic Slump. The numbers speak a clear language: as of the start of February, Israel had administered at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to almost 60% of its population, the United Arab Emirates to approximately 35%, the UK to approximately 15%, the U.S. to approximately 10%, and the EU only to about 2%-3%. As I explained early last month, the EU's purchasing decisions were wrong at any given point in time just based on then-available information (New York Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker)--and liability issues do not serve as an excuse, as it's simply a reality in a seller's market that not only prices but also other terms are impacted by the demand-supply discrepancy. And money could have solved the problem at the right time by enabling certain companies to invest in European manufacturing capacities early on--just what ex-president Trump achieved with his Operation Warp Speed program.
German and other EU politicians shouldn't make themselves ridiculous by sometimes arguing in the same interview that the U.S. can outvaccinate the EU because it's such a large country, and Israel does so because it's a small country. Some politicians sound like those communist leaders did in the late 1980s before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The problem is not going to get solved anytime soon, though I was surprised by the good news regarding the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, which appears to beat all other adenovirus vector-based COVID vaccines by a wide margin by using a different vector for the second (booster) jab (and both vectors appear to be unharmful human adenovirus strains)--the EU may end up importing that one. Meanwhile, the virus keeps mutating at a pace that makes it hard to follow. Yesterday, for instance, the BBC reported that the UK just found "more coronavirus cases with 'concerning' mutations."
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The EU should learn its lesson and reform itself. Brexit has its first success story (outvaccinating the EU by a factor of 5), and the EU will make things only worse if it doesn't think things through. The Daily Mail was never the EU's best friend, but in this article the British newspaper quotes media from all over Europe, including some very EU-friendly ones, who concluded they can't defend the indefensible anymore with respect to the EU's temporary intentions to put border controls in place between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in order to enforce vaccine export restrictions (which are, by the way, the epitome of "vaccine nationalism" as opposed to people being all for a coordinated EU effort, but criticizing what went wrong).
Even to only toss out the idea of compulsory licensing in this particular context is an insanity.
In the tech sector, I'm against injunctive relief except maybe under the most egregious of circumstances. Just yesterday I stressed again that patent remedies must be proportionate. And I'm not ruling out at all that maybe, further down the road, some general mRNA-related patents might prove overbroad--and compulsory licensing might be needed on antitrust grounds, should there be a clear and present danger of only one or two companies ultimately being able to make that new generation of vaccines (and potentially other types of mRNA-based medications).
But in the current situation, there simply isn't an economic case for compulsory licensing of COVID-19 vaccine patents. (To be clear, patent remedies are only available after publication of the related applications, and COVID-19 is too new for anything to have been published yet, but there are some general mRNA-related patents and patent applications that BioNTech might be able to enforce already against anyone plagiarizing their COVID-19 vaccines.)
The cost of lockdowns and similar restrictions is so high that there's enough money to be made not only for the companies that invented the vaccines but also by those who merely manufacture them. The recent deal between Pfizer partner BioNTech and Sanofi (which invested in BioNTech two years ago) shows that solutions can be worked out at the negotiating table. It's not just about immediate revenue opportunities: every contribution to what may help to solve the COVID-19 problem generates political goodwill and nice publicity.
What governments should do is incentivize such partnerships by making offers that enable both the inventor and the manufacturer to be generously rewarded. There's this saying that you sometimes achieve more with a gun and a smile than with a smile alone. In this case, however, the solution is money, not governmental heavyhandedness like in a plan-based Soviet-style economy.
I have to stress again that what I just wrote was only about COVID-19 vaccines. I do very much believe in the compulsory licensing of standard-essential patents (SEPs), as most of my readers know. But there's a difference between a couple or a handful of patents reading on a COVID-19 vaccine, with enormous risks taken, and the hundreds of thousands of patents one could theoretically assert against a smartphone maker or automotive company--and no single one of which patents truly protects a major investment in research and development.
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